Friday, July 31, 2015

Will election writ spell the end of the Harper government?

In Canadian politics, just three or four days before
the election writ is purportedly going to drop, proroguing parliament, both
opposition leaders are attempting to out-charm each other, as broad-brush foils
to the public’s perception of the prime minister, a mean-spirited and cynical
control freak who muzzles and/or eliminates all voices that might hint that his
government is not perfect.

The Prime Minister and his government (inseparable
as the two headed Janus of Canadian politics are engaged in a long process of
the abuse of power. To wit:

·Smugly
touting an election war chest that beats his two rivals combined, (“more
Canadians support our government than either of the other two parties” chimed
Conservative spokesman on CBC’s Power and Politics yesterday)...

·dropping
a combined $100 million on Toyota to update their Cambridge plant (with the
government of Ontario)

·visiting
the Governor General this weekend to generate the longest election campaign in
modern Canadian political history (thereby taking upmost advantage of his
party’s superior vault of cash

·sending
his Finance Minister out to contradict the Governor of the Bank of Canada when
he posits the view that the Canadian economy is sliding into recession (two
consecutive quarters with no growth)

·making
faux headlines on the back of a “balanced budget” that is so swiss-cheese
filled with holes, given the steep slide in oil prices and the government’s
having put all their “eggs” in that basket

·attempting
to overshadow the testimony of former Chief of Staff, Nigel Wright at the Duffy
trial in mid-August with election coverage

·demonstrating
extremely opportunistic and cynical judgement in the appointment of Duffy to
the Senate as media icon to raise funds for the party and then dumping him for
abusing the vague and hardly transparent Senate spending rules on ‘residency’
requirements, after Duffy himself protested to the Prime Minister himself that
his ‘real residence’ was Ottawa

·refusing
ever to meet with the provincial premiers and territorial representatives to
discuss anything including health care, environment, First Nations issues, or
even human resource development

·watching
the resignation from his Cabinet of substantive ministers like John Baird, Peter
McKay, Jim Prentice all of them in the prime of their political years

·rotating
ministers through the Environment department while persisting in denying and
avoiding substantive steps to protect the environment from the toxic tar sands

·dumping
the long-form census on which all academics and social planners depend for
their long-range projections

·appointing
candidates to the Supreme Court without fully complying with both the letter
and the spirit of the traditional pathways

·insulting
the Supreme Court’s highest judge and thumbing his nose at the court repeatedly

·refusing
categorically to call a Royal Commission to investigate the death and
disappearance of some 1100 aboriginal women, while employing the reductionistic
“we do not need to look at the sociology, this is simply a criminal matter”
rationalization

·removing
discretion from judges through maximum minimum sentences and building hundreds
of new prison cells while rejecting the research based approach of remediation
and reform of criminals

·introducing
and passing omnibus bills into the Commons thereby hiding nefarious and clearly
unpopular measures that would otherwise fail the test of passage in the public
interest, thereby upholding party interest above public interest

·failing
to balance personal freedom and public security in the C-51 Bill to enhance the
powers of the national security apparatus while simultaneously reducing
personal freedoms in the view of those who know and consider these options as
part of their careers

·bribing
all parents with cheap child-care cheques weeks before the election date,
thereby hoping to benefit from the manipulation of their loyalty in the voting
booth

·muzzling
all civil servants from publicly discussing scientific evidence that is
required for public application, having nothing to do with shaping government
policy

·emphasizing
the military aspect of foreign policy to the abject abandonment ofa Canadian historic contribution to
international geopolitics of mediation, negotiation and moderation and
PEACEKEEPING, costing Canada a lost vote for a seat on the United Nations
Security Council

·abandoning
the balanced and historic position of all previous Canadian governments
(Liberal and Progressive Conservative) in the Palestine-Israel dispute, while
also removing the Canadian embassy from Tehran

·reducing
the GST in another blatant attempt to bribe lower and middle class voters to
support the government.

And this list is hardly complete...merely a
remarkable list of taking Canada in the wrong direction, something for which
Canadians will have to spend the next decade reversing, if, as polls indicate,
we have the balls to throw the government out!

Unlike the leaders of the two opposition parties, I
am not, and have no need to be, restrained in my expressions of contempt for
the legacy of the Harper government or the Prime Minister. I am not in a
position to have to mollify public opinion when the media paints this piece as
“rash” “over the top” or even “extreme”. Like millions of other Ontarians, who
had to dig ourselves out from the debacle now known as Mike Harris, I hope that
Harper has so deeply convinced the electorate that pandering to fear, division
and blatant and cheap bribery is a governmental diet that breeds only
indigestion and gas, certainly not national nourishment and leadership. An old
adage in politics as revered as “all politics is local” is the aphorism, “you
can fool some of the people some of the time but you can’t fool all of the
people all of the time.”